Among Famous Books

He is constantly passing the shrewdest of judgments upon men and things, or retailing them from the lips of others. "Sir Ellis Layton is, for a speech of forty words, the wittie...

As to the Plague, we have all the vivid horror of detail with which Defoe has immortalised it, with the additional interest that here no consecutive history is attempted, but si...

Upon analysis, his paradox reveals as its chief and most essential element a certain habit of mind which always tends to see and appreciate the reverse of accepted opinions. So...

The legend has, however, a deeper significance than this. One of the most elemental questions that man can ask is, What is the relation of the gods to human inquiry and freedom...

_Haunted_, that is the word for this world into which we have entered. The house without its guests would be uninhabitable for such poets as these. The atmosphere is everywhere...

Then there came the extraordinary spirit of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. At first sight some things that he has written appear pagan enough, and have been regarded as such. The God of C...

In Omar's time Persian poetry was in the hands of the Súfis, or religious teachers of Persia. He found them writing verses which professed to be mystical and spiritual, but whic...

Something of this may be due to narcotics, and to the depressing tragedy of his life. More of it is due to Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne. But these do not explain the style, nor...

The first passage to notice is that opening one on Easter Day, where the devil approaches Faust in the form of a dog. Choruses of women, disciples, and angels are everywhere in...

The religious thought and faith both of England and of Scotland felt him, but his mark was deepest upon Scotland, because of two interesting facts. First of all, Carlyle represe...

In _Grace Abounding_ he very pleasantly tells us that he could have written in a much higher style if he had chosen to do so, but that for our sakes he has refrained. He does, h...

"Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; L...

Pepys was a pagan man in a pagan time, if ever there was such a man. The deepest secret of him is his intense vitality. Here, on the earth, he is thoroughly alive, and puts his...

The object of the following lectures is twofold. They were delivered in the first place for the purpose of directing the attention of readers to books whose literary charm and s...

Bunyan comes upon us full grown and mature in the work by which he is best known and remembered. His originality is one of the standing wonders of history. The _Pilgrim's Progre...

We cannot here touch upon the marvellous tales of Delos and of Delphi, nor repeat the strains that Pindar sang, sitting in his iron chair beside the shrine. This much at least w...

"And so it came to pass that on this morning Marius saw for the first time the wonderful spectacle--wonderful, especially, in its evidential power over himself, over his own tho...

This bracing doctrine carries us at once into The Everlasting Yea. It is not enough that a man pass from the morbid and self-centered mood to an interest in the outward world th...